Independent Online News
Hungary has blocked €50bn ($55bn; £43bn) in EU aid for Ukraine – just hours after an agreement was reached on starting membership talks.
“Summary of the nightshift: veto for the extra money to Ukraine,” Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban said after Thursday’s talks in Brussels.
Fifty years after being accused of plagiarism, book is reissued in a bid to rehabilitate gifted Malian author Yambo Ouologuem
Vanessa Thorpe Arts and media correspondent
In 1968 the books pages of the French newspaper Le Monde excitedly praised an uncompromising new novel, Bound to Violence, going on to salute its author as one of “the rare intellectuals of international stature presented to the world by Black Africa”.
US gathering of Pacific Rim leaders most notable for meeting between Joe Biden and Xi Jinping, seen as a sign of easing China-US relations
Guardian staff and agencies
Pacific Rim leaders have shown divisions over the wars in Ukraine and Gaza after a two-day summit of the Apec forum, while pledging support for reform of the World Trade Organization.… Read the rest
Fierce hostilities continue across Gaza from the air, sea, and on the ground, the UN’s top humanitarian official told Member States on Friday, reporting that 41,000 houses have now been destroyed or severely damaged.
More than 1.5 million Gazans are displaced, 18 hospitals have shut down, and hundreds of thousands are living in fear and under continuing Israeli bombardment.
The Israel-Gaza war is “taking away the focus” from the conflict in Ukraine, the country’s President Volodymyr Zelensky has admitted.
He said this was “one of the goals” of Russia, which launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.